Ep. 455: "The Birds Aren't Real Party"
Thank you.
Merlin: You can't hear that game.
Merlin: Hey, John.
Merlin: I'm having a little bit of trouble with your breakfast.
Merlin: Oh, man.
Merlin: It's amazing.
Merlin: It really is amazing.
Merlin: Beep.
Beep.
Merlin: there's a lot going on okay here's the thing though you know i think all of the world is watching ukraine and we're all you know in our way wanting to do our part yes i feel like that's me right now i'm like clarissa ward or oh boy or maybe like what the hell was that oh i want to send you i want to send you this video there
Merlin: They're using the big loader guy to slam long steel beams into the ground.
Merlin: Oh, sure.
Merlin: Well, yeah, I've decided I'm into it.
Merlin: Because, you know, who knows when I'll be able to prove myself this way again.
John: It's testing you.
Merlin: It's testing me and it's testing our listeners, to be sure.
Merlin: Testing all of our metal.
Merlin: Yes, it's very metal.
John: I am following the Ukraine.
John: I have a friend.
John: who has taken it upon himself to take all the good tweets about Ukraine and text them to me.
Merlin: Oh, my gosh.
Merlin: So you've got a – God, what is that?
Merlin: It's almost like a dead drop, like a news dead drop.
John: Yeah, because I've tried to follow it on the news.
John: You know, I've had a lot to say about social media in the last year.
John: But there's one thing that it's amazing at, which is breaking news from the front lines.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: And there's just, you know, trying to follow it through the mainstream media.
John: They're like, did you know the Russians have invaded Ukraine?
John: And then on Twitter, of course, it's like –
John: I'm in the foxhole.
Merlin: So you've got somebody who's – so there's a lot to that job because part of it is obviously they're –
John: Here come the tanks.
Merlin: Get your tractor out.
Merlin: Oh, boy.
Merlin: The insurgents is really picking up.
Merlin: Is your door open?
Merlin: It's not, John.
Merlin: Are you recording from the sidewalk?
Merlin: I'm like 30 feet away from where this is happening right now.
Merlin: And the entire office is shaking like thrice the worst earthquake I've ever been in.
John: The 50 or so Roderick on the Line listeners who routinely complain about this quality of the sound.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: And then you should have kept your powder dry.
John: Yeah, they're going to love it.
Merlin: So on the one hand, you have a friend who's obviously at the end of the funnel, is sharing with you the stuff that they feel like, based on information, that you should know about.
Merlin: But really the valuable part is the other fat end of the funnel, where they're standing astride all the great news coming in.
Merlin: Oh, boy.
Merlin: And then repackaging it for you.
Merlin: Yes.
Merlin: Almost like an executive assistant.
John: Yes.
John: And, you know, I had... You can't hear that, can you?
John: No.
John: I'd followed along.
John: You know, I have already followed a lot of journalists, Western journalists working in Russia and Ukraine.
John: I'd followed them back in 2014 during the Crimea.
John: So I was already following them because they're all hilarious.
John: And, you know, just that...
John: those East block people I've already fascinated by.
John: So they're, they're still out there and they're writing long think pieces, but I really want to see short videos of,
John: farmers stealing tanks.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: That Twitter list is good for that.
Merlin: There's one guy who's a real grind about, it's the guy with the numbers, and he's the guy who just keeps showing, I imagine you've looked at this, and he just, you know what, John, just to be clear, I'm not going to try to mute this.
John: Are they excavating in your office?
John: It sounds like they're coming up through the floor.
Merlin: If I could do it with good OPSEC, it would be difficult to do with good OPSEC.
Merlin: I could absolutely send it to you, but I think I described it this way to Dan, and then we won't speak of it again, except we certainly will.
Merlin: Imagine that you've got an emergency operation on MASH, and they say, spreaders, stat, because they've got to get it open.
Merlin: That's what they're doing.
Merlin: I think it's on Monday mornings when they reestablish their beachhead, if you like.
Merlin: And they do kind of look like those, what are these called, check asterisks?
Merlin: Retractors.
Merlin: No, the things on Omaha Beach, what do they call them, a Czech Wrangler?
Merlin: What do they call those big tank asterisks?
John: Well, yeah, they're tank traps, tank stoppers, stoppers.
Merlin: But it's important work.
Merlin: Maybe someday we'll have the streetcar again.
Merlin: So we were talking about... It's money heist.
John: You're actually part of a money heist, aren't you?
Merlin: I'm part of a money heist, yes.
Merlin: Paper house.
Merlin: Okay, yes.
Merlin: Oh, excuse me.
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John: I feel bad.
John: I want to start making noise over here.
John: Oh, wait, chair squeak.
John: Oh, that'll help.
John: Yeah, that'll help.
Merlin: I mean, you know, I could bend over backwards trying to get rid of all that, but there's really no point.
Merlin: There wouldn't be any podcasts left after.
John: The problem with that kind of noise limitation is that it just sounds so bad.
Merlin: Yeah, I mean, there's some amazing...
Merlin: What does that sound?
Merlin: Oh, that's part of the Bang Bang Machine's friend.
Merlin: It might be Concrete Cutter, Dr. Concrete Cutter.
Merlin: It's probably just Professor Pound Pound.
John: It's like you bought one of those.
John: It's literally exactly in front of my office.
John: You remember the 12-inch vinyl?
John: The shadow on my window.
John: You can picture the scene.
John: You know the 12-inch vinyls that were just like sound effects?
John: Oh, sure.
John: Absolutely.
John: It's like you bought the construction one.
Merlin: You know what I got?
Merlin: Because my kid and I love something that they do on Portlandia.
Merlin: One reason Portlandia is so goddamn funny, and I'm sorry they never had you on.
John: Yeah, it's kind of a disappointment, but...
Merlin: But they use the Hanna-Barbera Library of Effects all the time.
Merlin: And there's a giant set that I got off the back of a truck of like... Like every single one of those.
Merlin: You know, like when Fred Flintstone would walk on his tiptoes and go... Yeah.
John: And they were all done by a symphony orchestra and a giant soundstage.
John: And it's like people playing piccolo violins.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: And they just did it.
Merlin: So we were talking about Ukraine...
Merlin: Anyway, boy, my brain's a real pudding right now.
Merlin: Ooh, I bet it is.
Merlin: That's okay, though.
Merlin: No, no, I've decided I'm into it.
John: Yeah, so... But anyway, so my friend sends me these things, but, you know, he's not actually... I'm sorry, real quick, did he offer that to you, or did you ask, or how did it come about?
Merlin: He knew this friend of yours, it doesn't matter if it's a guy, probably, but this person knew how you feel about social media,
John: Well, no.
John: See, that's the thing.
John: He's a, he's an old pal and he was, and he, he texted me and said, Hey, I'm sorry to be blowing up your Twitter feed all day.
John: Uh, but I just can't stop, uh, sending you these videos.
John: And I wrote him and said,
John: Well, Trevor, you know that I'm not on social media.
John: I haven't been there for a year, so you're blowing up a ghost.
John: And he was like, oh, dude.
Merlin: You're blowing up a ghost.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Oh, remind me about that because I got a strong opinion about that.
Merlin: He was like, dude, oh, no.
Merlin: What makes the, in a given day, like if you can say within your own OPSEC limitations, what are some examples of recent things where you went, oh, man, that was worth knowing about.
Merlin: I'm glad Trevor's there on my behalf.
Merlin: Over.
Merlin: Over.
John: Zero things.
John: Trevor used to retweet things to me that were like,
John: Watch this Japanese dude jump off the side of a mountain on skis, land it, and then backflip over a tree.
John: There are a lot of extreme skiers, Merlin, in the world.
John: And Trevor's very interested in them.
Merlin: So am I. I became very attracted to the Slovenian girls when they were doing their big jumps.
Merlin: Did you catch the Slovenians toward the beginning of the Olympics?
Merlin: They were...
Merlin: Fucking amazing.
Merlin: You know, Slovenia is very alpine.
Merlin: I don't know how you jump 100 feet and land on skis and don't break something.
Merlin: Well, because the landing is sloped.
John: So it's kind of a fault.
John: You fly for a long time, but you're not that high off the...
John: I guess.
John: Wow, there's really a tank in your office.
Merlin: Hey, John, do you think we should keep at this?
Merlin: Is there any point?
Merlin: Oh, no.
John: No, it's good.
Merlin: Now, let me ask you this.
Merlin: I promised I wouldn't talk about this again.
Merlin: Would you prefer that I try to mute it or should I just leave the channel open?
John: No, no, no.
John: It's got to be open channel.
Merlin: So I got a foot switch.
Merlin: I got a little rat pedal down here.
Merlin: Is it by ProCount?
Merlin: Might be by Proko.
Merlin: I got what's called a panic button down here that I can hit with my foot.
Merlin: But I'm afraid all that's going to do is really then make it obvious when it's been turned off.
John: No, no, no.
John: Think about all of our listeners in New Zealand who all day long sit there listening to the sheep bleeding out in the pasture.
John: I love New Zealand.
John: They probably haven't heard an article of machinery or even a car in weeks.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Are you telling me it's that, what, agrarian?
Merlin: Did they live close to the land, John?
Merlin: What's happening in New Zealand?
John: Oh, yeah.
John: Almost every person in New Zealand is just sitting out somewhere on a windswept little promontory with a bunch of sheep.
John: And so they're listening to these tractors, and they're going, wow, America, you know.
Merlin: Oh, for them, it's like watching Metropolis.
Merlin: It's like, meet Mood's future is here.
John: What could those machines be doing, they think?
John: You know, are they feeding their sheep?
John: Are they bringing hay in for the sheep?
John: Although, I don't think sheep eat hay.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: They got good bacon there.
Merlin: Sheep bacon, I bet.
Merlin: Could be.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: Because, you know, humans bring what?
John: Dogs, rats, pigs.
Merlin: You're talking about the kind of stuff that we just encounter?
Merlin: What are you talking about?
John: Well, you know, guns, germs, and steel.
Merlin: Oh, sure, sure, sure.
Merlin: Jared Diamond don't use that well.
Merlin: Okay.
John: But anyway, so Trevor was sending all this stuff to, you know, he was blowing up a ghost.
John: And I said, well, Trevor, hey, here's the thing.
John: And this is what was crazy about.
John: Another crazy thing about social media is that a lot of the people, like Trevor, for instance, actually have my phone number.
John: And so Trevor...
John: texted me to apologize for tweeting stuff at me and i was like why don't you just text it to me and he was like well it's on twitter and i don't know how to do that i was like it's just one extra step so he started texting me tweets i see did you start a new channel or was it on your existing personal existing channel and but the thing is
John: The thing is, nobody's going to complain about my mouth noises now, are they?
John: I'm so calm.
John: I'm handling it extremely well.
John: But what it means is that I have to, you know, they're not screen caps.
John: I actually have to click on them and go to Twitter.
John: And guess what?
John: Now you're back on Twitter.
John: I'm back on Twitter.
John: And I was there, and then I actually clicked the home button to see, like, what's going on on my old Twitter?
John: The people that I used to follow.
Merlin: Oh, that would be so weird.
Merlin: That would be like going back to your elementary school.
John: It was.
John: Oh, everything's so small.
John: And what was crazy is I'm over here on Twitter for a long time watching this Ukraine stuff, all excited about it.
John: And then I click over and there are all these kind of thirsty comedians and people from...
Merlin: Yeah, RT, if you agree.
Merlin: There's a lot of engagement hustling going on around this that's pretty gross.
John: Well, but the thing is, a lot of it wasn't even Ukraine stuff.
John: It was just people like, my five-year-old said this hilarious thing that also makes me seem like a really good...
Merlin: And it's like people who are trying to get I feel like are trying to get engagement outside of their area.
Merlin: It's the same kind of folks that do a lot of the whole like, you know, if you can only have one movie to watch on a desert island, that kind of thing where you want to reach people outside of your circle.
John: Yeah, just get me those get me those retweets.
John: And yeah, and I did a new thing.
John: I did a thing I haven't done in years.
John: Which was I went down and just unfollowed a lot of people that I had been following since 2009.
John: Right.
John: I was like, oh, wait a minute.
John: It's okay.
John: I don't mind.
John: I won't mind.
John: No, no, no.
John: I would never unfollow.
John: I unfollow people.
John: Huh?
John: A lot of old friends, a lot of people that for the last year, I guess I've continued.
John: Well, I haven't been there, so there was no reason for me to follow or not.
John: But anyway, now I'm just, if I'm going to be on there, I just want to see Ukraine stuff and global sanctions.
John: I want to listen to people in the world.
Merlin: You want to see, like, that hot member of parliament.
Merlin: She's pretty thirsty, too.
Merlin: But that one hot member of parliament who likes being photographed with a rifle.
Merlin: God bless her.
John: An old lady.
John: I favored one yesterday of an old lady.
John: I'm sorry.
John: Somebody from Colorado?
John: Huh?
John: What?
John: Was she somebody from Colorado in the American parliament that likes to be filmed with guns?
Merlin: No, it's not her.
Merlin: No, these are real people.
Merlin: And there's one, remember those yoga commercials when we were a kid about, I forget which Eastern European country, but it was the Yoplait commercials where we're like, this is so-and-so and she's...
Merlin: You know, 89 years old, and she eats yogurt, and this is her mother.
Merlin: That kind of thing.
Merlin: One thing that makes this so different... Anyway, what I was going to say was, I'm not trying to be thirsty here, and I'm not trying to make this an entertainment event, but I do want to know what's going on.
Merlin: And like everybody, I think I'm feeling quite...
Merlin: uneasy and anxious and impotent about what to do.
Merlin: But one thing that was so different, it feels like, from particularly the Gulf's wars, is that, I guess, they've got a fairly limited number of positions that are safe in
Merlin: um for now where they can like you know have a clear like i say clarissa ward who rules like standing on a balcony or richard engel or whomever right i like the cnn international coverage um because i'm like that but it isn't there it's do you remember like when like shock and awe first happened and it was they had coverage like it was a coppola movie and
Merlin: And I don't know why that is different now exactly, especially given the existence of things like drones.
Merlin: But there's not as much... I kind of want to see what's happening right now.
Merlin: But then you get a sort of package... Because this is what they can do.
Merlin: I'm sure everybody's doing their best in these horrible circumstances.
Merlin: But then you get this sort of package repeating five-minute segment that runs to kind of bring you up to speed on what's happening.
Merlin: But when you're watching this...
Merlin: The reason I ask this, when you're watching this, what is it you're – specifically, as you can say, what is it you're looking for from getting this information?
Merlin: Just to kind of know where things stand, where things are going.
Merlin: Is it going to – for me, if I'm being honest, it's a lot of, oh, God, is there any chance this might be over soon?
John: Right.
Merlin: Which I know is a long – but when you're getting stuff from Trevor, what is it you're kind of hoping comes along?
John: Well, you know, from the time I was – what?
John: How old would I have been?
John: Probably –
John: I mean, I grew up playing war in the woods, right?
John: And for most of my childhood, we played World War II.
Merlin: Absolutely.
John: We used to play Tora, Tora, Tora, specifically.
Merlin: Longest movie I'd ever seen.
John: And we were in the middle of the Vietnam War during this period, but I don't remember ever playing war against the Vietnamese.
John: It was always against...
John: One of our two World War II enemies.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: And we were watching Vietnam on the television that night, or at least I was kind of peering over their shoulders watching Vietnam footage.
John: But when I went out to – in the woods, it was always the Nazis.
John: But then somewhere around 1980, I switched over into being a cold warrior.
John: Maybe it was 78 –
John: It was, you know, because in the 70s, we still had detente with the Russians, more or less.
Merlin: It really was that the term was still very meaningful from 1945, 46.
Merlin: It was a cold war.
Merlin: What does that mean?
Merlin: Well, it's not a hot war.
Merlin: It's not a war that's currently being fought.
Merlin: It's a war that I feel like I used I thought that term meant it's a war.
Merlin: There's a lot of tension and it could break out at any point.
John: obviously i guess the cuban missile crisis would be an extreme example of that but we we're also talking about the time when we've been through the stuff with iran right and and and i think i got aware of it was the soldier of fortune magazine years where you're suddenly aware like oh it's a cold war because there are these proxy wars in rhodesia and in you know america and this and that and the other and so i became somebody that that was
John: I was a teenager or preteen and all of a sudden I'm reading all these Jane's military magazines.
John: Oh, really?
John: And it was an era where Reagan was rebuilding the military and all these weapons systems that had been devised during Vietnam kind of started only to come online and
John: In the 80s, the F-15, the F-14, the, you know, like all of the kind of the new Minuteman 3, like Star Wars.
John: It was a time when military hardware was just...
Merlin: was just blowing up literally and figuratively.
Merlin: Because there was, like you're talking about though, I mean like the F series of jets, which were so crazy for the time.
John: The F series.
Merlin: Well, no, because weren't those the ones in going after Gaddafi?
Merlin: The ones that got shot down, were those F-14s?
Merlin: F-14s, yeah.
Merlin: But I mean, so, but then just to, you tell me if this is true, but you also had conventional weapons, and even though you had SALT and START and all that kind of, you would have START.
Merlin: But SALT II, all those kinds of things, we were trying to keep the nuclear stuff, you know, under a bell jar, but even still conventional weapons were getting more buck wild, right?
John: Everything.
John: It was the, you know, this was the M1 tank, this was the A-10 Warthog, you know, all of these new weapons and all of this new thinking about, like,
John: Oh, the Russians are going to...
John: The Russians are going to come through the folded gap, and then this, you know, it's the movie War Games, basically.
John: Every one of those scenarios.
John: Right.
John: And so as a kid, I was into that stuff like kids are into trucks.
John: Or baseball.
John: Or baseball.
John: And I was living in Alaska, so a lot of that military technology was arriving.
John: It would fly over your head, you know?
John: Wow.
John: And I was in the Civil Air Patrol, and my dad was, so we had...
John: We had access to the Air Force Base, so we were there all the time.
John: And so watching Ukraine now, there's that part of me, and you see it in a lot of the videos.
John: You see the Ukrainian soldiers with the same kind of giddiness over, and a lot of the comments, too.
John: Just giddiness about the technology of the gear, right?
John: And you see all these guys.
Merlin: That apparently is a Twitter type I did not even know about.
Merlin: And this is not just the people on my timeline who like to guess whether this is a T-whatever or not and what the Z means and all that.
Merlin: It seems like there are some Janes types.
Merlin: Oh, for sure.
Merlin: They're in their corn right now.
John: They are.
John: And they're just like, oh, well, you know, that system is the, that's the B system.
John: But the newest system, you know, the T-34B is the one that has the, and they all know, you know, they know it.
John: And you're right.
John: They're just, they're as happy as can be.
John: And I. It would be like if you suddenly were called upon to identify Les Pauls.
John: Yeah, exactly.
John: Oh, yeah, Les Paul Jr., but I don't know about that bridge pickup.
John: Les Paul Jr.
John: is now strafing the city of Kiev.
John: If it has a V on it, that means it's from the east.
John: So all of those, like, um, actually military hardware dudes, I just love them in the... Normally I would hate them, right?
John: Because they'd normally be in some comment thread saying, like, well, you know, a flat tax...
Merlin: Or they would be like the gun rights.
Merlin: They might be the gun rights style.
Merlin: Actually.
Merlin: It's not a bullet It's a cartridge guys.
John: Yeah, you know when when that when that cartridge not a bullet wolf Wow, I'm gonna hear about from that one boy when the when there was that mass shooting in Las Vegas.
John: Oh god.
John: Yeah, I was still on I was still on 4chan at the time and that was an example of how you know Twitter is like breaking news and
John: But 4chan sometimes had that ability to just be like spooky.
John: That's why QAnon.
John: Yeah, absolutely.
John: Because there was spooky stuff on there.
John: People that were on 4chan that clearly were.
Merlin: People to know stuff that it would be very surprising.
Merlin: And they know stuff in there, right?
John: Yeah.
John: And they would say something and then five hours later it would turn out to be true.
John: And they would put it in there just like, well, you know, we'll see.
John: Here's what it actually is.
John: And there was a guy on 4chan, before the police had even broached the room, that was like, well, that's not automatic weapons fire.
John: That's a bump stock.
John: And here's the caliber of this.
John: And it was super spooky because it was still happening.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: And wasn't it over 400 people?
Merlin: It was a lot of people.
Merlin: It was a lot of people injured and killed, right?
Yeah.
Merlin: A lot of people injured him.
Merlin: How did he get all these weapons into his room?
Merlin: Like all that stuff.
Merlin: Yeah, that was a whole thing.
John: But so watching it, you know, and it's not anything, it's not surprising that I feel this way.
John: And I don't, it's not anything to apologize for.
John: It's just a kind of fact of war that a lot of war making is just,
John: train sets, you know, it's just like people buying cool stuff.
John: That's really expensive that does blow ups.
John: And that's what the, I mean, and it's one of the major critiques of the military that we've been levying since the 1920s, which is just, this is just a game and these are toys and they produce death and
John: Which is like the fifth or sixth line item that anyone's taking in.
John: I mean, death is number two in its functionality, and it's number five or six in asking whether or not we should buy it.
John: Like, oh, this will bring a lot of death, although we should think about whether that's a good thing.
John: We'll do that in a different meeting.
Yeah.
Merlin: It also reflects something that I only really started to understand in the last few months about how a large business works, which is the way that a military has always worked, is compartmentalization.
Merlin: You think about the management structure of any company, at least as I understand it, and what is the role of a manager?
Merlin: It's not like when you first learn that HR is not on your side, it's on the company's side.
Merlin: But when you first discover that, like, if you're the manager, as I've said before, if you're the manager of this Walmart in Dalton, Georgia, your job is to never let a problem leave your store, either through a mad customer or to go up to your regional manager or whatever.
Merlin: Everybody wants that keep – not for a lack of transparency, but just because your whole job is to maintain –
Merlin: Let's pivot to unit cohesion, which is you can trust that this store is going to be run in such a way that you don't have to worry that your orders will be followed.
Merlin: And that goes up and up and up until you get all the way to the top, where it really becomes – I mean, you're talking about all kinds of machines of –
Merlin: of war and of the ways that we keep them working, which we got to talk about the way that we keep them.
Merlin: We keep ammunition available.
Merlin: We keep fuel available for your 40 miles of trucks, all that kind of stuff.
Merlin: But like unit cohesion also means that I can get to the point where as say an Eisenhower, this really almost becomes like a chess board where I don't have to guess if I moving the night,
Merlin: will cause it to do something I didn't expect.
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Isn't that kind of what it's all about in business and war?
Merlin: It's like, if I make this decision on this big map, this will happen without me having to worry about the human factor.
John: It's one of the incredible things about, and the American military, you look at it in contrast to what's happening now, and you realize, when I went to Africa with my friend Matt Martin,
John: And he just was really good as an Air Force officer at explaining to me – he was obviously into the airplanes and the cool stuff.
John: But he really took a lot of time as we walked around these military bases explaining the basic truth of the military, which is that it's all logistics and that –
John: Every – that the number of people that are actually ever going to fire a bullet is so small compared to the number of people that are moving crates of water and moving – Make sure that those – that you've picked the right wheels, the kind of right tank to be in the famous Russian mud, for example.
Merlin: But then like who takes care of making sure those wheels continue to work the way they're supposed to?
Merlin: A lesson that probably should have been learned by –
Merlin: Nobody better than the Soviets 70-plus years ago.
John: But also, you've got to get enough noodles for everybody to have dinner.
John: And you've got to have toilet paper, and you've got to have all this stuff.
Merlin: For one of the nail, the horse was lost kind of thing, where every little bit of this, the materiel and ordinance, two words I never get to use, that all this stuff be lined up, which makes it so strange to me that you would have a single file, 40 miles of trucks...
Merlin: And I just kept thinking, and I made a joke about this on the internet, about how it was a lot like the Loot Train episode of Game of Thrones.
Merlin: I'm not trying to be Lindsey Graham.
Merlin: I'm not trying to be one of these saber-rattling guys.
Merlin: But there was a part of me that thought, if you can take out a Russian tank guy with a grenade launcher in a city square, if you made three big holes...
Merlin: At the I guess that would be easternmost part of that.
Merlin: Like if you if in the first one eighth of that convoy, if you made three giant holes in that road through explosives, they'd be pretty, wouldn't they be pretty fucked?
John: Well, that's where they are right now.
John: I mean, all it takes is for somebody to throw a.
Merlin: molotov cocktail at the first of five trucks exactly but enough of a pile up that's what all these people say you've got if you're doing urban warfare you need to make your city into a porcupine and you've got to find ways to make anything that has any scale to it not viable but but also just like like like we're talking about here like each one of they've got people sitting in trucks right now running the engine because it's so cold out how are you going to refill all of those well that's the other thing you know
John: Never invade Russia in the winter.
John: Also, don't be Russia invading anything else.
John: That's the irony, John.
John: This has the makings of a Stalingrad.
John: What's funny is that the logistics component, though, at least in how I've kind of come to understand it, like the United States in Iraq got stuck in a logistics gyre, which is to say that
John: because they did have their logistics worked out and they always could get a truck full of band-aids here or there.
John: And they could always, there was always, you know, pallets of water moving around that the army command begins to think that that's success in war.
John: And so because they had it all buttoned down,
John: They... They get a false sense, not of security, but a false sense of success?
Merlin: Yeah, because it's impossible... Because we haven't gotten fucked on that yet, and if we don't get that right, we can't get the rest right.
John: So you can't... But the thing is, you know, hearts and minds, right?
John: They're not... Nobody in Aleppo loves the Americans.
John: They're not, like, calling for democracy.
John: But when you ask the army, how you doing in Aleppo?
John: They're like, oh, well, you know, or...
John: I mean, I'm talking about the Russians now.
John: Yes.
John: They had, you know, they had it all buttoned down.
John: And so when you ask them how they're doing, they're like, I've got I've got a you know, I've got these metrics.
John: Right.
John: We've moved this much stuff.
John: We have this perimeter established.
John: And Matt Martin is talking about his experience as an officer in the Air Force in Iraq during these periods where.
John: Um, where by all accounts, the American military had it
John: completely buckled right it they just couldn't account for the fact that every night there were all these bombings and every night they they you know as soon as they left an area because they're camping in a porcupine in some ways yeah and it's the same same with vietnam yeah but what the other thing i'm looking for after the excitement of just like look at that it's a helicopter getting shut down so in addition to just watching the cool
John: explosions, which, you know, again, you want as a middle-aged guy, as a liberal, you don't want to say, I just think that the guns are cool and the tanks and the airplanes are cool.
Pew, pew, pew.
John: Yeah, because you sound like a dope or you sound like a gun nut.
John: You sound like a child.
Merlin: Yeah, but in fact, like... Watching a Russian plane get shot out of the sky, I don't feel great about saying this.
Merlin: But it's amazing.
Merlin: It's pretty amazing.
John: Yeah.
John: But I'm getting something else out of it, which is this – and you're starting to read commentary at this level, which is that one month ago, it seemed, I think to a lot of us emotionally, like we had become such a divided world.
John: That the United States was no longer a leader in terms – could no longer lecture the world from any moral high ground.
John: There was no longer any confidence that democracy was even working in the United States, let alone anything that could be advocated or exported.
John: I think in a lot of cases, social media seemed like it had perverted the idea of democracy to the point that nobody even was really sure if that's ever what we wanted.
John: Like democracy, we've been pushing so hard to make democracy universal.
John: And because it seemed like to not do that is to make it not democratic, right?
Merlin: We can't even agree on, you know, fact patterns.
Merlin: We can't even agree on what happened.
Merlin: I mean, after the brief January 6th and 7th moment where people seem to be coming together around, wow, that's not okay.
Merlin: I mean, now we're reversing to the mean.
Merlin: Like, we're right back to, like, can we be trusted with democracy at this point?
John: Well, can anyone, right?
John: I mean, it's a question of, there are a lot of stupids and it's, it's not even a, it's not even a today problem.
John: You know, if, if we had had a universal suffrage in 1901, would the, would the people have been capable of, you know, I mean, it's a terrible, it's a terrible opening to conversation because the,
John: From the standpoint of the left, universal franchise is like a core value.
John: It's just that – and to advocate for anything less is to say, well, it's not a true democracy, right?
John: We just have exclusive groups, elites that are controlling the government and that's undemocratic and that ends up being – perpetuating all these institutions that are unfair.
John: But you lay it out, one person, one vote –
John: And what you get is there are a lot of dumbs and there's no amount of information.
John: Even if the funnel only had truth in it, all it takes is the truth to get put in front of 10 dumbs.
John: And one of them's like, I don't know, birds aren't real.
John: Right.
John: And then you lose 10 dumbs to the birds aren't real party.
Right.
John: And you just go, well, okay.
John: And so all of that felt, even a month ago, like, Jesus, man, I don't know what side to come down on.
John: And three years ago, I was online arguing so vociferously in favor of
John: the idea of America and democracy.
John: And I knew these things were, were, would survive at all.
John: Right.
Merlin: And like part of your omnibus package was, it seemed to me was that you can't pick and choose all these different parts that in order to, there has, there has to be freedom and there has to be discourse and there has to be friction and there has to be like, you know, ethical behavior, but like, you know what I mean?
Merlin: You can't just do this cafeteria Catholic version of American patriotism and then just choose to amplify just that one thing.
Merlin: That's not wholesome.
John: Right.
John: There has to be both sides.
John: I mean, as far as I was concerned in the last three years, the argument that both sides was some kind of contemptible thing for a person to entertain in their mind –
John: Like to say, but on the other hand, meant that you were— You mean like post-Charlotte, both sides-ism type of things?
Merlin: Or just the idea that one has to be defeated, one side has to win, the other side has to lose?
John: The thing is, the Charlottesville both sides is like, yeah, obviously Donald Trump is a contemptible dumb.
John: He's a dumb, yeah.
John: But to say that that somehow—
John: uh uh delegitimizes any argument other than the than the agreed upon party line that was a ludicrous over over i mean it was just a i don't know it's just it's too dumb to even consider but i was getting 10 tweets a day they were like both sides boomer and it's just like wow man okay yeah guess you got it all figured out but now
John: We're seeing the UFO, like the UFO factor, right?
John: Which was...
John: which was there was always an argument against the idea that revealing UFOs to the world was going to cause mass chaos.
John: The argument was that if we understood there were UFOs, it would bring the entire world together, right?
John: We would all have either a common enemy.
Merlin: Oh, yeah, the sort of thought experiment of like, what would it take?
Merlin: I've heard some people say, would it take an alien invasion for us to realize that we all are in this together?
Yeah.
John: Yeah, it's the experience that the early astronauts had looking down at the earth and going like, wow, whatever my politics were before.
John: And it was the whole, I mean, I think that first photograph of the earth, the color photograph of the globe from space actually had a profound political impact on
John: Globally because everybody looked at it and went, oh, wow.
John: Yeah.
John: We're, you know, we're on spaceship earth.
John: Yep.
John: And what's, what's crazy about this situation is that, that within a couple of weeks, this Russia invading Ukraine and failing has brought a kind of, it's not just schadenfreude.
John: It's, it's like a, a recognition that there is a,
John: That there are differences, profound differences in the way that we conduct our political life, right?
John: And that the United States and Western Europe and the nations of the world, you know, that believe in the 20th century version of collective action, free access to the media –
Merlin: um human rights well i mean even even if one were to sound a little bit um not cynical about that but like i don't think it's cynical to to think also in terms of like how does this hurt or harm all economies like there's you know what i mean because you know we need to run economies people need to get food people need to get to work all that kind of stuff and it's like i think that i think one part of the perhaps
Merlin: Perhaps a slightly overblown neoliberal technocentrist idea of the 90s and 2000s was this idea that, you know, these are good for peace.
Merlin: These are good for prosperity.
Merlin: These are things that will help us to have an international economy.
Merlin: I think so.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But I mean, the idea of like, you can't have, it's much more, it's going to be much more difficult to have international commerce if we don't trust each other.
Merlin: And it's going to be, I mean, at all, if we don't have like, you know, trusted brokers for things, things like Swift, like obviously, but the idea that like, Hey, look, this is, this is partly because, you know, there's a reason we have so many different committees in Congress is they address different, they hold different parts of the camel, if you like.
Merlin: And commerce and economics is part of it.
Merlin: It's not – you're not being a purely callow capitalist to say, like, you know, I mean, you would not have had those good jobs at GM in the 60s if it weren't for the peace, by and large, of the 60s.
Merlin: Otherwise, you'd just be making stingers or javelins or whatever.
Merlin: You need that for – I guess what I'm saying is to grease the wheels of economics, you need to know – you need to be – peace benefits that much more than not.
John: It's going to be really interesting.
John: I think part of the gloating that's happening right now is the recognition that because there were Visa cards in Russia and Visa could turn that off with a switch, that was a way for us to connect with the 30-year-old that was shopping in Russia.
John: Like, what do you mean my Visa doesn't work?
John: Like that kind of global capitalist –
John: web it feels powerful to us right now to be able to to
Merlin: remind the world like actually that's located in London and New York it's not it never was completely decentralized it didn't belong to you you know it's a it's actually a tool you can take your library card anywhere but the library lives here and for right there's a lot of straight and especially crooked Russian money living in London right now but like this this is the devil's in the details for all of these things right yeah
John: And what's weird is that China now and Russia are going to try to – in the aftermath of this, they're going to try and build a global economic like counter order, right?
John: Like China is going to – and their global partners, they're going to recognize like, oh, there's a vacuum in the banking universe –
John: That we need to not keep trying to take over London, but it's like Trump's social media.
John: China's going to say, we're going to start our own global bank.
Merlin: If we have our own pipeline and our own version of Swift, etc., we will have more flexibility to do the kinds of things we want in the future.
John: Right.
John: But to divide the world to say, oh, we're not going to do global banking system anymore.
John: We're going to have one banking system and then another banking system.
John: I mean, it's basically the Cold War again in a different way because China and Russia's banking system, I mean, depending on how much – it's going to take a long time to rebuild a global network.
John: once you shut it down.
John: I mean, maybe Russia backs out two days from now and they're like, great, let's turn SWIFT back on, we're all friends again.
Merlin: But they were talking about this on Political Gab Fest, it's like, well, okay, well, have we established what the things are that Russia needs to do to what level of completion to, like, reverse these things?
Merlin: Because as with COVID, it's one thing to turn everything off, it's another thing to turn things back on a little at a time.
Merlin: Don't you think?
Merlin: It's going to be pretty complicated
Merlin: I think that's the least of our worries right this moment, is that Russians are going to suddenly capitulate and take their ball and go home.
Merlin: But to get things rolling again, there's a lot of pieces that have to turn on in a certain order, right?
John: Well, yeah.
John: But on the other hand, a lot of the global distrust, a lot of the...
John: But I mean among nations that are now all banding together like Hungary and Turkey were really trending the wrong way in terms of being part of a network of friends of America, right?
John: They were headed toward being military dictatorships and they're all –
John: sort of not, there's a lot of, there's a lot of work to do before they're reintegrated into like a NATO universe, but like a, a liberal NATO universe, but they are, they sided, there's no better way to put it.
John: They sided with the West and there's no better way to put that.
John: And that's galvanizing.
John: Um,
John: And I think the way we chose to run that whole run-up, which was very unique, that kind of like, well, we're just going to give all the intelligence to everybody.
John: We're not going to hold our cards.
John: That's virtually unprecedented, isn't it?
John: And it seems so smart now because by the time the invasion happened, not only were we not surprised, but we already were unified in a kind of –
John: In well in in what was true.
John: It was a version of.
John: It was a way of of establishing.
John: before the first bullet was fired, that we all agreed what was true.
Merlin: And that was super cool, and it feels... Almost like you guys on 4chan going, hey, I'm going to put down this marker here, you guys think whatever you want, but just come back here in a week and see what happened.
Merlin: That's what happened.
Merlin: When Blinken gets up there, or whomever gets up there and says there's going to be a false flag operation, and this is going to happen, and they're going to claim that an orphanage got bombed, and then here we are now, however many days later...
Merlin: And now they're fudging on their supposed ceasefires to let people out.
Merlin: It's like every single bit of this is straight out of a screenplay that nobody would ever put on because it's too ridiculous and evil at this point.
John: And what's great is it preempted any kind of...
John: char charlatanburg not charlatanburg charlottesburg both sidesing it preempted any of the wrong kind of both sidesing which is like well there's the truth but also these guys killed a lot of people too yeah aren't they the same you know we just eliminated that possibility so that there wasn't so that the the fox news talking heads couldn't say well they you know the ukrainians did bomb an orphanage
John: It had just been all that was agreed upon in advance, you know, well enough ahead of time.
John: And that's what, you know, that's a that's a novel way of using the intelligence community.
John: I always all through the Cold War, I was like, why is this stuff secret?
John: Because revealing it doesn't hurt us.
John: Tell us every Russian agent you find.
Merlin: Is it to cover up methods the same way, at least according to the movie about the World War II movie with Turing?
Merlin: We're like, okay, we have to let these people die because of Meinzer Hagen's Haversack.
Merlin: We have to keep playing it off legit.
Merlin: Otherwise, if we stop every attack that happens, they're going to know how we got this information, right?
Right.
John: And again, that's true in situations, but they use that as a blanket,
John: a blanket philosophy of intelligence for 70 years oh right we're spooks 24 7 spooks you're not allowed to know anything and the and the problem with that of course is that you that the technology keeps changing you know you you have a microphone in your tie and they discovered it and then you can't use that anymore and like you know simon garfunkel gave it all away when they let the whole world know that his bow tie is really a camera
Merlin: Well, yeah.
John: They said it was written on the subway walls and everybody was like, no, you shouldn't have said that.
John: They didn't have to go check.
John: It's ridiculous.
John: Exactly.
John: But but all of that secrecy, it just piles up around your ears until you lose the ability to tell what's really important and what isn't.
John: You've got you've got you've got buildings and buildings of top secret classified material that if it was all released, it wouldn't matter.
John: But you're guarding it and you're putting more and more stuff on top of it.
John: And it's like, actually, the stuff that we need to be secret is this kind of really small little nut of stuff.
Merlin: And if you're doing the uncut shit of deciding that birds aren't real, these kinds of things are probably going to seem like a cover story for a cover story.
Merlin: If you're fully bought in on birds aren't real, then stuff like we think there's going to be this false flag attack.
Merlin: And of course, a lot of them, a lot of the thumbs in the Alex Jones types are going to go, hey, that's our term.
Merlin: We're the people who claim things are a false flag.
John: And the thing is, I don't even care about those people.
John: The ones I'm worried about are the legitimately intelligent, college-educated, leftist people.
John: Uh, intellectuals who believe that the entire world is controlled by a conspiracy of underground bankers and committees.
John: You know, there's like, it's not the moon landing people that I worry about.
John: It's the consensus on both the left and the right that what we see is not real.
John: And that the globe is actually, you know, that all of these nations are actually controlled by general dynamics and the board of directors of Shell Oil that live under the North Pole.
Merlin: When we share the wisdom from, was it Mike?
Merlin: Mike or Jason, that feelings are real.
Merlin: I mean, that's Mike.
Merlin: Mike Swires.
Merlin: The thing about that, feelings are real, but they're not the only thing that's real.
Merlin: And I think that sometimes people might think that, like, just, I don't know, it just seems like a lot of people can benefit from a little bit of liberal arts school to go, like, two things can be true.
Merlin: Like, but just because feelings are real doesn't mean that you should always...
Merlin: And again, another term I just learned in the past month, the fallacy of relative privation.
Merlin: If I can think of anything that's worse than this, you're invalid.
Merlin: If I can think of anything that's better than this, it's invalid.
Merlin: People are just jumping straight to, yeah, but what does this have to do with the lizard people?
Merlin: I know you're not talking about those particular people, but who hasn't felt like truth has been cheapened in the last six years to a point where you start to feel like a real simp for believing there is a true thing?
Yeah.
John: My hair is a bird, therefore your argument is invalid.
John: My hair is green and I'm a tree.
John: I'm a blue boy.
John: But that's – that is the problem.
John: And the thing about this is we're watching global capitalism and global capitalism right now feels – it's funny because it feels very – it feels almost like they have –
John: They have the moral imperative, right?
John: Like, wow, the global capitalists are the ones that are fighting this war on behalf of the West.
John: Wow, good job, stock market guys, because we're changing the way the banks are propping up the ruble.
John: But at the same time, global capitalism is terrified of what's happening.
John: Yeah.
John: And much more of it, and we're going to, I mean, already gas prices are in the $4.50 up here.
John: I don't even know what they are in San Francisco.
Merlin: I think it's $11.75 a gallon right now.
Merlin: I imagine that's hitting a lot of other, I mean, California's got a lot of wackadoo stuff that makes gas expensive for a lot of reasons, but it's in the places where you're used to it costing a lot less that that's really got to feel like a hit right now.
John: Well, and that's just the beginning.
John: Talk about global supply chain problems.
John: And unfortunately, two years ago at the start of the pandemic, I think a lot of us really believed, oh, wow, this is a reset.
John: I did.
John: Why don't we not all get in our cars ever again?
John: Why don't we not all rush back downtown?
John: Why don't we not cough on each other?
John: And maybe it'll... I mean, let's... This is going to be... Remember those statistics about how pollution just dropped off a cliff in those first couple of months?
Merlin: It was almost the equivalent of a Gaia bomb where, I mean, and again, we get over our skis about the whole evolution and change stuff, but there was enough different...
John: Nature is returning.
Merlin: Yeah, nature's healing, yeah.
Merlin: Manhattan, but the difference is even in things in Manhattan, like over a period of weeks, it was pretty wild.
Merlin: Somebody posted an image today of people returning to work, and the lobby of the office building has all these, I think this is in Canada, but ridiculously dispiriting signs, which is like, oh, but your dog misses you, and at least you're out of your jammies now.
Merlin: And like, oh, God.
Merlin: Why can't we just be... The other day I referred to blue jeans as hard pants.
Merlin: Oh, wow.
Merlin: You've gone a long way.
Merlin: I'm lifestyle sweatpants now.
John: You've fallen all the way.
Merlin: Make your case to why wingtips should be part of my world again.
Merlin: Tell all those ladies that it's time to put on high heels and bras again.
Merlin: You're going to get a fight on your hands.
John: You don't even have drawstring on your pants now.
John: It's just that kind of – it's like a hairnet except pants.
Merlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merlin: You just kind of put it over your gun, get it in there.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: But what's fascinating about this is like kind of – I mean you feel like –
John: It's it's hard for me to know.
John: Did we actually make some profound changes during the pandemic that now we just accept as a new normal?
John: And so we can't celebrate them because that's not in our natures to celebrate our victories.
John: It's only we can only look at how bad things are and how how we went back from the pandemic and are just causing it.
Merlin: There's so much pain distributed over so many people that it almost seems a little crazy to think about, not to me, but to other people.
Merlin: This is how I'm wired is like, you know, I'm not going to get into Chinese symbol talk here, but, you know, opportunity.
Merlin: We talked about this two years ago this month, probably, John.
Merlin: There's so many tremendous opportunities in choosing opportunities.
Merlin: to how we might want to live differently.
Merlin: And what, you know, what is it that causes all these goddamn extroverts to like, want to run around and breathe on each other.
Merlin: But I really thought you and I talked about this so often, John, it really seemed like we were to use your phrase on the cusp of at least a handful of pretty interesting changes in how we choose to conduct ourselves rather than go back to what money white people call normal.
John: And I wonder whether this current situation in Ukraine – and there's a lot of – in any war, right, there's going to be a lot of focus on the destruction, on the pain and suffering of the people.
John: But wars are diplomacy by other means.
John: And the longer this goes on, the more it potentially represents an opportunity for a reset of a lot of things.
John: If I doubt very much, no matter when it ends, that it will be a simple matter of, okay, well, let's start buying Russian oil again.
John: And the longer it lasts, the more we start to compensate for the – and Western Europe starts to compensate for the lack of Russian oil.
John: The longer this schism happens, you know, I just read an article today.
Merlin: Is there a chance that there's any chance at all here?
Merlin: I know we don't talk about this, but is there a chance that we could see?
Merlin: I know it's not possible today, you guys, but is there a chance maybe we could find ways to start using a little less oil?
Merlin: Is that a thing you want to look into?
Merlin: Because I keep thinking about 1972, 1974, the embargo.
Merlin: And the conventional wisdom became – I mean, again, the simple version of this is way oversimplified, which is that the Japanese ate our lunch because they had better quality control.
Merlin: But the oil embargo and the cost of oil certainly had an impact.
Merlin: in getting people's minds to at least consider the idea that they didn't need to have like a two-door Chrysler New Yorker to go pick up milk.
John: If you think about a 1975 Chrysler New Yorker and you think about a 1980 Chrysler K car.
John: I could barely close the doors on our New Yorker.
John: They were so big.
John: They were so heavy.
John: You could swing on them.
Merlin: Oldsmobiles.
Merlin: Oldsmobiles were crazy.
John: I mean, it felt like you were getting into a tank.
John: Some of those were the longest cars ever made in history.
John: But if you think – I read an article this morning about the International Space Station and the fact that the Russians are – I mean that tension is now in the space station.
John: Are the Russians going to detach?
John: But more importantly, every rocket we use, including the SpaceX rockets, including NASA rockets, including Amazon rockets, their motors are all made in Russia.
John: I did not know that.
John: There is a certain stockpile of rockets that we've already purchased, that we have in warehouses, that will allow us to keep going to space for a certain amount of time.
John: But we have stopped making our own rocket motors.
John: Well, that's a great idea if you believe in a global economy where the Russians have their own – they're over here fighting in Chechnya and we're over here fighting in Iraq.
John: But when it comes to space, we put our differences aside.
John: But what are we going to do when we run out of Russian rocket motors?
John: Are we going to start buying them again at the end of this conflict and try and bring a lot of reengineering to have anything else?
Merlin: Like, I mean, I like to think that the projects I worked on were complicated, but just knowing that there's a piece that finishes here and then there's assumptions for the next two years of production and development based on that, how that decision got made.
Merlin: Do you know what I mean?
Merlin: I doubt it's going to be easy to just grab the eraser on the whiteboard and change it from Russia to Switzerland or whatever.
John: I feel like those Saturn car factories in Tennessee, maybe they could be repurposed to be rocket factories.
Merlin: They also got Oak Ridge there doing their nuclear stuff.
Merlin: Oh, Tennessee could really, my goodness, that'd be, oh, maybe super drag.
Merlin: You could start performing again.
Merlin: I sucked out the feeling.
Merlin: I did that.
Merlin: Jesus Christ, John, I'm so sorry.